CHI 2007 Advance Program: Session Details

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Education & Culture (Experience Reports)

Tuesday
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM

 

A Theory-Based Approach to Designing Student Learning Context

Dr Jarinee Chattratichart

How can we keep technology-focused computing and software engineering students interested and engaged in a soft subject like HCI? How can we avoid leaving the less gifted and less enthused students behind in a 12-week module packed with theories, methodologies and a new development tool to learn? This paper describes how educational research findings were deployed to address the above issues across four semesters in an HCI module at a UK university. Kolb’s experiential learning cycle was successfully applied to the design and scheduling of course content and learning activities to enhance students’ learning outcomes. Surveys of the students - both at the beginning and at the end of each semester - consistently showed improvement in students’ understanding and perception towards the subject and their satisfaction with the module.

 

Mandala: Supporting Social Presence and Interaction in the Chinese Home

A.R.D. Rajan
Liu Like
Neema Moraveji

Multiple factors lead social software to be unevenly adopted by differing age segments in urban China. This paper presents user research to understand the discrepancy between parents and their children and attempts to address them with the design of an information appliance. The appliance uses novel techniques to magnify and emphasize unidirectional social presence data so as to address social concerns that exist. The appliance attempts to support interaction ranging from peripheral awareness to real-time conversation. Initial reactions to the design are also presented.

 

Education, Entertainment and Authenticity: Lessons Learned from Designing an Interactive Exhibit about Medieval Music

Marius Wolf
Eric Lee
Jan Borchers

In this paper we describe the design experience gathered from creating an interactive exhibit about medieval music. This system was designed as an educational exhibit that relies on audio as its only feedback channel. We focused our work on three major goals: educational value, entertainment aspects, and historic authenticity. We present insight into the challenges in designing a system with these goals, and how they could be solved.

 

Establishing Relationships For Designing Rural Information Systems

Yael Schwartzman
Tapan S. Parikh

Designing for the developing world presents unique challenges. Establishing rapport with local partners is important to overcome contextual unfamiliarity and ensure the relevance of proposed solutions. In this paper, we discuss our experiences designing a CAMbased mobile data capture system for Asobagri, a rural coffee cooperative in Barillas, Guatemala. CAM is a camera-based mobile application framework designed based on fieldwork with rural microfinance groups in India. Our local partners in India are now using the CAM framework in a real application. We list some practices that have helped us establish and sustain both these design relationships.

 

A Bridging Design Prototype for Investigating Concept Mapping in the Preschool Community

Gloria Gomez

This paper reports on pilot studies where teachers from two different preschools incorporated a bridging design prototype (BDP) for concept mapping into classroom activities. Designed under inclusive, participatory, user-centered principles, the BDP was used to perform observations assessing an interaction problem, and in familiarizing the researcher with the user community. Results showed voice-input devices promote illiterate children’s authoring and self-regulation skills when adding meaning to symbols. Teachers noticed such devices are not found in current educational resources, and unexpectedly, they increased participation of children with special needs.